Monthly Archives: November 2006

Allchin recants, er, clarifies

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Further to that earlier post, Jim Allchin has been, er, clarifying his remarks about Vista and anti-virus software.

During a recent discussion with journalists about the release to manufacturing for Windows Vista, I made a comment about how attacks on the Internet are getting more and more sophisticated, and some of the security features in Windows Vista really help our customers. This somehow morphed into people thinking I said customers shouldn’t use antivirus software with Windows Vista.

When the articles and blogs started appearing, I asked the PR folks to send me a copy of the transcript of the call so I could read it over and see if I said something I didn’t mean. After reading the transcript, I could certainly see that what I said wasn’t as clear as it could have been, and I’m sorry for that. However, it is also clear from the transcript that I didn’t say that users shouldn’t run antivirus software with Windows Vista! In fact, later in the call, I explicitly made this point again, because I had realized I wasn’t as clear as I should have been. It’s important for me that our customers are using the appropriate security solutions for the right situations, whether that’s security functionality integrated in the operating systems, or add-on products.

The point I had been trying to make (albeit unclearly) is that Windows Vista includes new security features that can dramatically help improve our customers’ security for certain situations. I was asked a question about how I rated the protection provided by Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and whether or not it was still effective. I ended up telling a story about how the machine my seven-year-old son uses has no antivirus software installed because it runs in a very locked down configuration, which includes only being able to visit websites on an approved list (approved through the parental controls feature in Windows Vista). He also has no access to email or instant messaging and he doesn’t run as an administrator of the machine. In fact, parental controls in Windows Vista requires that the user you apply controls to is not running as an administrator. Email, phishing, and other social engineering attacks are definitely among the most prevalent attacks that home users experience today, and his machine has been locked down in these regards.

My point in bringing up this extreme example was really meant to emphasize that importance of defense-in-depth measures we put in Windows Vista—both the number of defenses and their combined effectiveness.

Now, the comments have unfortunately been cited out of context implying that I said Windows Vista users shouldn’t use antivirus. I want to be clear, most users will use some form of antivirus software, and that will be appropriate for their scenarios. In fact, Windows Security Center, a great feature in Windows Vista, specifically encourages the use of antivirus software.

G’day Bill; pardon me while I strain the potatoes

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Microsoft Office 2007’s dictionary will recognise Australian colloquialisms such as g’day, sheila, bogan and dag. Microsoft said that 24,000 Australians voted in an online poll on its website for the 20 Aussie words they felt were most culturally relevant. G’day led the pack with 2868 votes, following by sickie with 2152 votes, ute (1912), trackies (1597) and bogan (1557).

Previously, when typed into Microsoft Word, all of these words appeared with a red line under them, indicating a spelling error. Tony Wilkinson, information worker business group director at Microsoft Australia, said the reason for incorporating the above “quintessential Aussie vernacular” into Office 2007 was to make the software more user-friendly for Australians.

“Although many Australian words and spellings are alreadyincluded in Microsoft Office, we saw the upcoming release of the 2007 Microsoft Office system as the ideal opportunity to make sure the Aussie classics weren’t forgotten and new Aussie words were added,” he said.

Online voters got to pick from a shortlist of 41 words, compiled by a panel of local language experts including David Blair, the founding member of Macquarie Dictionary’s editorial committee. “Australia has a unique cultural background and, as a result, there are a number of Australianisms in our language,” he said, praising Microsoft for its recognition of Australian culture.

[Source: Sydney Morning Herald]

The inexplicable success of the Daily Mail

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As I noted earlier, Andrew Neil gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow, in the course of which he argued that newspapers that don’t embrace online media are doomed.

During the Q&A at the end, a smart journalist named Donna Leigh asked a simple question. If he was right about the urgency of going online, how did he explain the continuing success of the Daily Mail which, to date, has rather avoided Cyberspace?

It was interesting to see that Brillo Pad was unable to deal with the question — and indeed reverted to type by suggesting that he and the questioner (an attractive woman) might discuss it further, er, later. (I’m sure that was entirely innocent, but it brought to mind the famous observation of one of his subordinates at the Sunday Times that “if you couldn’t f*** it or plug it in then he [Neil] wasn’t interested”.)

Anyway, Roy Greenslade has returned to the issue raised by Ms Leigh. Here’s part of what he has to say:

The undeniable truth is that the Mail, as the questioning Leigh correctly said, has been defying the overall downward trend that’s affected the rest of the market, and that does deserve some explanation. Neil pointed out its professionalism and its attention to editorial detail. I could have added that it has positioned itself perfectly in that bit of the market which has grown in the past 20 years, the working class who have aspired to be middle class (and largely achieved it). It also purveys the values of the middle class, a commonsensical conservatism allied to a pervasive sense that those values are under attack. Unlike the red-tops below it, it has maintained a sense of dignity. Unlike the serious papers, it has embraced populism without appearing to find it somehow distasteful. It has also – and Neil also noted this – benefited from the collapse of its middle-market competition in the shape of the Daily Express.

In other words, the Mail (and its successful Mail on Sunday stablemate) is living on the laurels of long-run demographic change and its clever identification with the people who have lived through it. That change may have reached its zenith or, just possibly, may yet have a little way to go. But the Mail’s success, having inured it to the circulation problems suffered by other papers, meant that it didn’t see the point of investing some much time and energy (and money) in digital platforms. Now, belatedly, it is doing so.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think the delay will necessarily have a negative effect on the Mail’s future. It will surely have learned from the lessons of those papers that have pioneered online journalism. But the really interesting factor is the conservatism of the current Daily Mail audience and the likelihood that fewer young people will be drawn to its values and its agenda.

Cracking the Da Eliza code

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Peter Preston, writing about last week’s blood-curdling speech by the Director-General of MI5…

Does Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller truly believe that the cult of Osama is some passing, youthful fad that will one day be gone, like David Cassidy’s fan club? Will it somehow be swept away by new boy bands or iPods? Not exactly, it seems. We must all stand up for our core values, “equality, freedom, justice and tolerance”, she says. We must therefore confront “the powerful narrative that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the west’s response to varied and complex issues, from longstanding disputes such as Israel/Palestine and Kashmir to more recent events, as evidence of an across-the-board determination to undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide”.

Code-crackers will note that she lists those issues and disputes alphabetically. “Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Lebanon are regularly cited by those who advocate terrorist violence as illustrating what they allege is western hostility to Islam.” They should also note that she goes way back before 9/11, which means before Baghdad and Kabul, too – to the 1990s, when al-Qaida was blowing up Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and killing hundreds of innocent Africans. So these “roots” go very deep.

And where, in any meaningful sense, can they be reckoned to start? Not in Kashmir, against a Hindu enemy; nor in Chechnya, unless Putin has become an honorary pillar of “the west”. Did Washington dismember Yugoslavia? Is Tony Blair about to sabotage the birth of a Muslim Kosovo? No, the loose threads of this tapestry lead inescapably back to what she calls “Israel and Palestine”. Maybe bringing peace to the Middle East after over half a century of vicious strife wouldn’t bring total generation shift, the lessening of a fury, the erasure of hatred. But it would be a beginning, a symbol, a chance to start afresh…

Hostages to fortune

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Jim Allchin, Microsoft VP, quoted on Good Morning Silicon Valley, talking about Vista.

In my opinion, it is the most secure system that’s available, and it’s certainly the most secure system that we’ve shipped. So I feel very confident that customers are far better off by using Windows Vista than they are with anything that we’ve released before.”

Earlier, he had said that he was so confident in the operating system’s security measures that he believes there’s no need for Vista users to run any third-party antivirus software.

Stay tuned.

LATER… Bill Thompson has written an insightful column about this. Excerpt:

Vista will ship with Kernel Patch Protection – also called PatchGuard – which checks to see if the core has been altered in any way. This should make it a lot harder for viruses, trojans, rootkits and other types of malicious software, or malware, to install.

PatchGuard will be backed up by support for the Trusted Platform Module, a hardware component built into many new computers that gives the operating system a way to store and use secured information.

The new approach should make life more difficult for malware writers, but it is also going to get in the way of legitimate security software vendors such as Symantec, which has already pointed out that its anti-virus programs rely on being able to modify the Windows kernel, something which will no longer be allowed.

Microsoft’s response is to argue that “kernel patching”, as the process is called, is not needed and that the standard security tools are all that are required.

It may be right, but it’s hard to tell because we don’t actually know much about what is going on inside the Vista kernel. Microsoft, like many other commercial software developers, prefers to keep such details secret.

“If severe flaws are discovered in Vista”, Bill concludes, “and there already signs that the lockdown is far from perfect, then users may well wonder why they have put their faith in the ‘benign dictator’ approach to security.”

The Great Revulsion

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In the run-up to the mid-term elections I was puzzled by why UK media outlets were regularly consulting an odious, right-wing fanatic called Grover Norquist.

Just reading Paul Krugman’s reaction to the electoral results makes me even more puzzled. He mentions our friend Norquist:

I’m not calling for or predicting the end of conservatism. There always have been and always will be conservatives on the American political scene. And that’s as it should be: a diversity of views is part of what makes democracy vital.

But we may be seeing the downfall of movement conservatism — the potent alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. This alliance may once have had something to do with ideas, but it has become mainly a corrupt political machine, and America will be a better place if that machine breaks down.

Why do I want to see movement conservatism crushed? Partly because the movement is fundamentally undemocratic; its leaders don’t accept the legitimacy of opposition. Democrats will only become acceptable, declared Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, once they “are comfortable in their minority status.” He added, “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.”

Norquist is famous for his desire to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” According to his Wikipedia entry, “his close business and political ties to recently indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff are the subject of a current federal investigation.”

Welcome to Googlewood

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Interesting — if inconclusive piece by Richard Siklos about whether Google is a friend or a foe for traditional media companies.

Is Google a media company? The last time I checked, a media company was generally defined as a business that accumulates audiences and sells access to them to marketers.

And Mr. Schmidt said recently: “Ultimately, our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all the world’s information. That’s part of our mission.” And if it is a media company, it is the world’s biggest, with a market capitalization of $144 billion.

But when I spoke to David Eun, Google’s vice president for content partnerships, he took umbrage with the media designation. He noted that Google did not create or own content — in his mind, part of the definition of a media company. Rather, he said, Google is a technology company: “I would say we’re a conduit connecting our users with content and advertisers.”

The point may be semantic, but it reminded me of the longstanding friction between cable companies and TV broadcasters over whether cable should pay for distributing the free over-the-air signals — or whether cable was doing the broadcasters a favor by putting their signals onto the system through which most people watch television.

Again, Mr. Eun disagreed, noting that Google is not a distributor: it tries to push people to other Web sites and takes immense geek pride in how quickly it does so.

Indeed, a search for “Google” and “friend or foe” took me 0.10 seconds and elicited 271,000 results. It took Mr. Eun not much longer to try to explain to me that Google (a) respects copyrights, (b) gives any content owner a choice of opting in or out of its search results and (c) focuses on ways to help its media partners achieve their goals. “I say firmly: we are friend because we are trying to build your business objectives,” Mr. Eun said.

The future’s already here

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The Observer has an edited version of my rant to the Society of Editors Conference in Glasgow…

In any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren’t interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears – still – from the newspaper industry is that there’s something wrong with the customers. And what one finds, on closer examination, is that the industry seems determined either to insult or to ignore them…

The Wikipedia cycle

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Fastinating post by LeeAnn Prescott based on Hitwise data about how people access Wikipedia. The chart shows

the steadily increasing market share of visits to Wikipedia. What you’ll notice upon closer examination is that Wikipedia’s traffic is tied to the academic school year. That bump in December 2005? Finals and term paper time. The subsequent dip? Christmas vacation. The larger bump in May 06? Finals again. Another dip in traffic during the summer months, and another surge in September as school starts.